Local Veteran Recalls 'Great Raid'

Memory By Movie

Newport News resident Sam Ring was part of the rescue mission depicted on the big screen. His story has a twist that not even Hollywood would believe.

Sam Ring isn't complaining. He knows that Hollywood frequently changes some details when it makes a feature film about real-life events.

But when the Newport News resident watched "The Great Raid" last weekend at AMC Hampton Towne Centre 24, he couldn't help but spot some discrepancies between the movie and the 1945 mission in the Philippines that freed more than 500 prisoners of war from a Japanese camp.

The movie shows the soldiers crawling through a flat, grassy area as they approached the camp. In real life, Ring says, they crawled over the dirt dikes of a rice field. And the plane that flew overhead to distract the Japanese prison guards was a P-61 Black Widow fighter; the movie uses a different twin-engine plane.

Ring, 78, notices these things because he was there. Not two weeks past his 18th birthday, he participated in the daring raid upon the Cabanatuan prisoner-of-war camp on Jan. 30, 1945.

"The movie was interesting to me, because it was like a piece of history," says Ring, who grew up in Pennsylvania but settled in the Denbigh area after retiring from Fort Eustis in 1974. "It's a pretty good movie, really. They always change things to make the story bigger than it was, but it's really pretty accurate."

Ring's own story of the raid has a twist to it that would be too fantastic even for a Hollywood screenwriter.

He was a guerrilla in a demolition unit in nearby Pangisinan that was supporting the 6th U.S. Army Rangers on the raid.

Ring was never inside the Cabanatuan camp during the raid, but three days after the raid, Ring and a few other soldiers stopped by the makeshift hospital that was treating the POWs who had been liberated, as well as other wounded soldiers.

"We were walking through that hospital and I heard someone say, 'Hey, Sergeant Ring,' " he recalls.

"I turned and said, 'Yes?'

"But the guy said, 'No, not you -- we want that Sergeant Ring over there.' I looked where they were pointing, and it was my father."

Ring, a buck sergeant, knew that his father, Master Sgt. Walter Ring, had been captured by the Japanese in 1942. The family believed he was dead. Even if he was alive, there was little chance he would still be in the Philippines by January 1945. Of the approximately 10,000 U.S. prisoners being held there, about 95 percent had been moved to sites in Japan.

But Walter Ring had defied the odds. Sixty years later, Ring is stoic as he describes that moment.

"I guess we were both pretty stunned," he says. "I don't know what kind of reunion you'd call it, but it was a happy one."

He pauses for a moment and then concludes, "I managed to spend a half a day with him before I had to leave."

Ring's father died in 1974. Ring himself has trouble getting around because of a degenerative condition in his spine.

He was happy to see "The Great Raid" bring this story to a wider audience.

The film has done mediocre business at the box office; playing on fewer than 1,000 screens nationwide, it has made about $6.5 million in its first two weeks of release.

"People are paying more attention to the Iraqi war than they are to World War II," Ring says.

But he's glad he had the chance to see "The Great Raid," and he says the film hit him on a very personal level.

"That was so long ago -- wow, 1945," Ring says. "I had actually forgotten some of the names of the guys I served with, and I never thought that would happen. This movie really brought a lot back to me." *